Overwhelmed! … and struggling to launch or scale online?

2018 has started out as a pretty phenomenal year already! I’ve been 18 years in this ‘digital’ world… mainly running varying agencies on the theme of digital.

Well, here I am — still running an agency ‘Interval’, though last year I set out to start to make a big change.

I realised that there were some common themes that kept recurring in the day-to-day business which were bugging me. I had to start scratching that itch! So here goes…

Shiny new things!
Businesses were still blowing their budgets on ‘shiny’ new websites or beautiful marketing campaigns and then complaining that they didn’t see a return on investment or worse concluding that they just don’t work and they either had missed the boat with ‘online’ or were the wrong type of industry/vertical for online to work.

Travelling at 100mph…..
Entrepreneurs were keen to jump two feet in to the online space and would embrace all things digital with gumption… full speed ahead with blogging, tweeting, Facebook, live video, whitepapers, infographics, socials memes — you get the picture. Only to find they ran out of steam and hit burn out!

Dreaded overwhelm
There were SO many options with what they could do, what their peers were already doing, what ideas they had and so on… that they actually didn’t do anything! They were paralysed with in-action purely due to a fear of where to start.

What if it’s wrong?
Alongside overwhelm businesses and entrepreneurs alike worried that they could get it wrong… It wouldn’t be perfect first time… What if ‘someone’ saw it and judged them. Or worse they just saw a competitor produce an amazing campaign or piece of content and theirs didn’t turn out like that! — Instead they do nothing. Or they keep going back to the drawing board only to find a distraction that adds further delays or worse they still can’t replicate that amazing style they so long for.

Do any of these resonate with you? Are you suffering from one or more of these?

I’ve experienced all 4 of these myself on numerous occasions and still to this day have the gremlins in the corner of the room waiting to strike.

Frustrating isn’t it…

I’ve met so many businesses and owners who have huge potential to achieve incredible success online and scale beyond their wildest dreams but they just can’t hit that sweet spot.

Worse – most (as you know!!) are in the trenches or on the coal face running the business so any time they (you) do have is spent trying to quickly find that winning formula.

For the past 12 months I’ve been working on a solution. I’ve bottled the knowledge and expertise I’ve acquired from leading an agency for the past 18 years and I’ve applied it to a new formula for guaranteed success online.

It suddenly occurred to me last year that we’re surrounded by so many options and golden opportunities to succeed online that it almost makes it impossible. We try to take on far too much and in doing so we fall flat on our face!

Instead I believe we need to approach the strategy with a different point of view. We need to reverse engineer our goal and start with the end in mind.

If we look at any sports professional experiencing success — they create this massive success by deploying some simple but proven strategies to keep winning.

In this article I wanted to explore the first — The BIG ‘F’ — failure!

Fail Fast

They fail fast — they aren’t afraid of losing as they understand to win more frequently and on a more consistent basis they have to learn from their losses. They spend time analysing why they lost and adapting their approach and strategy to ensure they increase their ability to win next time.

If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. It’s a sure thing that a doer can’t help but makes mistakes.

Maybe the first step to overcoming failure is to erase that word from your vocabulary. Failure is a destructive word that others use to describe events when they don’t achieve their goal however we need to embrace this when trying to hit that sweet spot attempting to market and scale our business online.

There is no such thing as failure it merely gives us an opportunity to learn when a goal is not met.

Ultimately we learn best when we make mistakes or experience disappointments as we have an opportunity to grow from them. It’s how we respond to them and learn from them that makes us truly successful.

Are you ready to embrace failure when marketing your business online? If you are — make sure you take one piece of advice… that is — do it quickly!